My Favourites

January 18, 2006

But what next?

Now that I’ve done all of the research into Print on Demand (PoD), I’m been wondering if I should take it a step further. I have found another PoD publisher who is even a bit more cheaper than Diggory Press. I am not quite certain of the facts and figures since I am still waiting on their customer support to provide us with exact figures but on the printing side itself, they appear to be a bit cheaper than Diggory. However, if you include all the setup costs, they are much more expensive for one book.

The keyword there is *one* book. If you publish multiple books, the cost will begin to come down. This has led me to thinking about the possibility of becoming a publisher :p Yes, don’t bust out laughing just yet … Listen to the whole idea first :p You see, there seems to be a slight gap in the whole publishing hierarchy at the moment. You have your regular publishers who will only accept works that they think are commercially viable and then you have the PoD publishers where you can print whatever you want as long as you pay them. How about the area in between? What if you were to offer selective publishing for authors/books that have potential, via PoD?

Yes, I hear you saying, "Hey, if they were that good, they would have been picked up by a regular publisher!" You’re probably correct. But then again, what about the authors who cater to a niche market? What about really good authors who might not be willing to take the plunge into regular publishing because they aren’t sure about themselves? What if I (or rather we, since Laurie wants to come in on this one :p) could help somebody be published? I know I want to be published, not so much for the money as for the satisfaction of achieving something that I’ve wanted to do since I was able to read What if I could help somebody feel the same joy?

We’ve been discussing this quite a lot and at the moment, my biggest concern is the cost involved. We would have to go to some expense to set everything up and if nobody is interested in such a service, I don’t really want to spend all that money for nothing. At the moment, what I’m thinking of is to publish my novel through Diggory and if that makes enough money to set up this venture, and we get enough expressions of interest in such a service, we’d go ahead and set it up. But we’ll see … Of course, if you’re interested in something like that, do let us know